Discombobulated: A Primer

 "Hang on I'm all combobulated" I said and though I didn't mean to say it, and I actually meant the dis version of it, the comment to Sweetie as I tried to get ready to leave for the Milwaukee office the other day got me thinking about discombobulated.  So I went to learn more about it, and can share that with you:

-- Discombobulated has been a word since 1834.

-- Discombobulated was not even the original version of this word. The ORIGINAL version was discombobricate. Both words were 'fanciful' versions of discomfit.  In 1834, people had nothing better to do than sit around making up versions of words for other words nobody ever used.

-- Think about that the next time you complain about all the 'screen time' kids get these days, and then knock it off.  I would rather my kids stare at a phone all day than have to spend their time making up fake words, getting married at 8 and dying of typhus at 13.

-- The antonym of discombobulate is recombobulate. All of which suggests that combobulate, or some form of that word, is a thing.

-- It is not.  Combobulate is not a word.

-- Almost everyone says that the word began around 1834, but no source says how anyone knows that. This strikes me as the kind of thing that was just said one day and then everyone believed it, like that saying about how people only use 10% of their brains.  That, too, is not true. Most people don't use ANY of their brains, ha ha.  But seriously, we use more of our brains than that and also, I bet "discombobulate" was not first coined in 1834. I bet it was made up in like 1973 or something.

-- According to the Dictionary of American Regional English, discombobulate does not actually come from a 'fanciful' version of discomfit. Instead, the 'bob' part of it came from bobbery, which was a word meaning "uproar or confusion." As in "There was a lot of bobbery at the State Fair when that giant corn dog exploded."

-- The "potential" World's Largest Corn Dog was disappointingly small. It was just basically a big piece of bologna that was about the size of a guy's head. 

-- Isn't it kind of weird that everyone says that the word began around 1834 but not a single source I found could say why that is?

-- Really isn't it?

-- This site said the word "rose to fame on the popular sitcom Seinfeld." I have watched every Seinfeld ever and frequently have it on in the background while I work. I know Seinfeld pretty well. I even recognized that one comedian, the one who asked Jerry about his nostrils, as the guy Rachel borrows the cell phone from on Friends when she drunkenly calls Ross to say she is over him (only she's not really over him! SPOILER ALERT.) I don't recall anyone on Seinfeld using discombobulated.

-- And yet they did: In Season 3, "The Parking Space," there is this exchange:

Jerry: What did you do to my car?!
George: I couldn't help it! Elaine moved the mirror. I got discombobulated.
Elaine: Oh, like you've ever been "bobulated."

Which is weird because I always thought it was combobulated. But Elaine begs to differ!

-- In Jerry Seinfeld's Reddit AMA, he said that one of his plans had once been to be sympathetic to hecklers because it would discombobulate them.

-- So I think maybe Jerry Seinfeld made the word up.

-- There is a song called "Discombobulate," on the Sherlock Holmes soundtrack:

I

It kind of sounds like how it feels to be discombobulated, doesn't it?

Scooby Doo: A Primer

This morning, as I got Mr F out of the car after our first calm-him-down ride of the day, this thought popped into my head:

Was his real name Scooby Doo, or Scooby Dooby Doo?

This was kind of a weird thing to be thinking about insofar as I never really cared all that much for Scooby Doo, and insofar as by "never really cared all that much" I mean never cared at all. But that is how my brain works, and I therefore had to immediately go read about Scooby Doo on Wikipedia, where I learned a lot about Scooby Doo, like how he is destroying America, and also a lot about monkeys and things.

Here's what you'll need to keep up with water-cooler talk about Scooby Doo:

-- Shaggy's full name is Norville "Shaggy" Rogers.

-- Originally, Scooby was a dog named "Too Much" who played the bongos.  Sometimes he was a sheepdog. Other times he was not.  The name changed between the first time the show was pitched, a bid that failed, and the second time.

-- Scooby's name comes from Frank Sinatra's song Strangers In The Night, where he sings doo-be-doo-be-doo. I would put a video of that song in here but I don't really care for that song, and besides you know how it goes, and also I'd rather put in this video for this song that I really like and have been listening to all week:



-- Scooby's character is based on the roles Bob Hope played in horror comedies.

-- Scooby, unlike other dogs (?) has opposable thumbs and a fully prehensile tail.

-- Animals with prehensile tails are predominantly Western hemisphere animals, with most of them in South America.  Some scientists think this is because the jungles of South America are more dense than elsewhere.

-- Porcupines and opossums have prehensile tails.  I thought the scariest possible thing I could imagine now was the idea of a porcupine dropping down on me from a tree while walking in the woods at night, but then I read that in other jungles where animals with prehensile tails are less prevalent, there are flying snakes.

-- Flying snakes can climb trees, and when they get to where they want, they push off with their tail and reshape their rib cage to form a pseudo-wing which helps it fly the same way frisbees fly, and I really can't read any more of that without starting to think things like "Seriously WTF God?"  But it is amazing, and terrifying, stuff:



-- Scooby, perhaps presciently predicting what would happen to 'traditional values' (i.e. they would go to Hell) once gay marriage became the law of the land, once fell in love with a  "large blue reptilian creature with a beak-like mouth," but he can be forgiven for that because the creature, an alien, was disguised the whole time as a golden retriever wearing a red bandanna.

I'm going to maybe alienate some people here when I say that if you put a bandanna around your dog's neck I judge you (and not in a good way, the way judges might judge "Obamacare," which is now the law of the land and which means we won't actually get a fix to our healthcare system, ever, because Republicans hate fixing things and Democrats think health care is fixed. It is not. People still cannot afford health care and now they cannot afford health insurance, and most insurance plans range from "crappy" to "really very bad it's not even 'insurance' at all." Judges, or at least the ones that count for now, think this is okay, because Congress intended this to be okay. Which is how the legislative-and-judicial-review process works, but in this case it worked really, really badly, and the key hallmark of Obama's tenure is not a very good one.)

The kind of people who put bandanna's around dog's necks are the kinds of people who will stand, knee deep in the water at the beach, drinking their 'hard cider' and wearing baseball caps that don't look quite right and play a game involving a frisbee and knocking beer cans off into the water, and I will have to keep Mr F away from them because he will want to see what they are knocking over, and really can't you leave that stuff at the frat house?

 (Note: that was based on a true story yesterday at the lake.  Also true: there were tadpoles in the lake and when people went by in their stupid boats and on their stupid jetskis, the resultant waves would toss the tadpoles up onto the beach, where a bunch of little kids noticed them and began what can only be described as a massive and heroic effort to save these tadpoles, pouring water around them and picking up clumps of sand with the tadpoles on them to carry them back to the water.  These kids did this for 30 minutes or so, and Mr Bunches even joined in:

-- That was not Scooby's only assault on 'traditional family values.' Scooby Doo attacks traditional values the way jetski-owning jerks attack tadpoles: often, and for no reason.  This one time, Scooby-Doo competed with one of his cousins, Scooby-Dum, for the "affection" of Scooby-Dee "who is also their cousin."

-- This other time, Scooby got Sandy Duncan to fall in love with him.  That Sandy Duncan, who once pretended to be a boy who abducted several young kids from their homes.

-- Antonin Scalia predicted exactly that kind of behavior and never has one man been proven so right so quickly.  Jiggery-pokery indeed!

Oh, and his name is neither. It's "Scoobert Doo."

Toasters: A Primer.

It occurred to me this morning that I don't really know how toasters work.  I was wondering specifically if they use a timer or simply go until they get just so hot and then shut off.  So I looked them up and learned:

-- In primitive times (1892 and prior) people toasted bread over open flames using grids or forks made for that purpose, but all that changed in 1893 when the first electric toaster was made by Alan Macmasters of Scotland. Even then, it took 17 years for toasters to be commercially successful, in part because of the difficulty in making heating elements and in part because electricity was mostly available only at night.

-- Early toasters cooked only one side of the bread at a time, and the half-toast had to then be hand-flipped to cook both sides.  People's lives became easier when in 1913 an automatic bread-turning toaster was created.

-- It's amazing to me that it seemed easier to rotate the bread than to cook it on both sides simultaneously.

-- Also, why was electricity mostly available only at night?

-- In 1925, the first dual-side toaster became available.

-- The next major innovation in toaster technology (USA USA USA) was automatic lowering-and-raising toasters that required no pushing of levers. Put the toast in, the machine does the rest!

-- That toaster sensed the heat in the center of the bread to determine if the toast was done, so regardless of what temperature the bread was when you started, it always toasted the exact same.  This is WAY better than my toaster, which is never re-set from its current position, that position being the exact one that Mr Bunches wants when cooking his Blueberry Breakfast Treats to the proper ("not too browny!)") texture, but despite us never moving the lever the toaster, which we bought for $10 at a drugstore, cooks everything to a different degree, sometimes barely toasting it, sometimes turning it to charcoal.  My toaster is far less advanced than a toaster a housewife would have used in 1942.

-- Actual sentence from the Wikipedia article I read to compile this list: " For home use, consumers typically choose a toaster type based on their intended use."

-- You can buy a toaster for as much as $399 at some stores but if you do that  you're an awful person.

-- Nowadays, most toasters use heat sensors, apparently, but I believe that mine uses a timer, because in mine the first toast is usually underdone, and that is a mark of a toaster that times things, as the heat elements are not as hot on the first round of toasting, with repeated uses meaning that later toast starts off hotter but cooks the same length of time.

-- Toasters in pop culture include the "flying toasters" screen saver on AfterDark for early computers, as well as a Jefferson Airplane album cover:

And "The Brave Little Toaster,"

which originally was not published as a kids' story because publishers thought the idea of talking appliances was too 'far fetched.'